Alan Pennington's Blog

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As the race to sign up students fro next years University places hots up,,,,not least as their was a dip in the birth rate in 2001 which means less students and more places available than ever.  As we all know the number of students is multiplied by the ridiculous University Fees now being charged to drive their funding.

What this means is that getting the student Open Day experience right is critical to being able to attract the best and the highest number of students for 2019 courses.  My kids have been applying and the experiences really do vary to the extent that it is clear those that have a strategy and are executing and those that have not yet bought into the need to do so!

We have found that Oxford Brookes is doing a good job not least because once you register to go to the Open day they begin a dialogue and provide information that has clearly been designed to attract and impress, down to the personalised mailings, tours and sample events available.

When you are applying to multiple Uni’s and getting response (or not) on a regular basis it is very obvious and definitely a positive when someone has made an effort to think differently!

I have recently started working with the team at Perlego, a fast growing resource for both business professionals and students where you can get access to an amazing range of books through a simple subscription, covering a huge array of subjects. I have started to curate my own list of CX books and supporting texts that are well worth a read, check out my initial list here         www.perlego.com/lists/69/customer-service-manager 

Happy reading!!

This is  question i am often asked by those in the client world of B2B, of course the answer is very simple…YES!  If you substitute the word customer for the word client then the same principles apply and indeed I would argue it is MORE relevant in the B2B world…why?  Well think about this if you win or maybe lose a major bid for business in a  competitive pitch the the consequences good or bad are magnified many times over.  Given that in many competitive business pitches the products the various contenders are actually selling is almost the same as their rivals the choice without an experience component becomes one of price and margin.  If you can introduce a new variable which is about not just what service you will provide but how you will provide it then you have the potential for a marginal gain on your competition.  How many times even after filling in the ‘judging grid’ do decisions get swayed by sentiment “we liked that team better”, “we felt we could work with these guys even though they were not the cheapest”, in other words the decision making is influenced by a value for money overlay that uses engagement as a key dimension.  I know it happened to me when I was a client,”yes they are the cheapest but look at the people we are getting and the potential service trade-offs!!”.

If you are in a B2B world you should be looking for every opportunity to create those marginal gains that an experience can deliver, through not only actual contract delivery but right from the get go of responding maybe to an RFP to how you pitch.  There is a world of opportunity to differentiate in a way that you can’t with the pure product and price play.

I was recently in South Africa and stayed at a Raddison Blu hotel, now what was interesting was this was counter to the advice I had from my South African business colleagues who had a really negative service experience at the same hotel a few weeks earlier.  Much of the concern was around waiting to be served, failure to acknowledge and similar behaviours -what I would call ‘eyes off’ service.  We have all been there, when even though there appear to be plenty of staff no-one actually provide the service you expect, there is nothing worse in service terms than feeling ignored. from a customer viewpoint.  There are numerous reasons that this can happen particularly in hotels, “it’s not my job”, “I have this task that I have been told to do by my Manager”, and so on largely driven by a hierarchical approach to work – how many times have you seen a Manager go behind the bar when customers are queueing to be served or jump on an empty Reception point…all too rarely and these failures in leadership contribute to the behaviours of the general staff.  In addition when it comes to training the focus is on Health and Safety or statutory training rather than the finer points of service experience.

Back to my hotel where I did indeed observe a lot of the above behaviours and could see why my colleagues were disappointed.  So I had a chat with the Duty Manager (interestingly and very positively he was a back-office Finance Manager who had asked to go front-line for the weekend) and asked if I could have a chat with a couple of the staff members to see if we couldn’t improve the experience at no cost to the staff member of the hotel.  No surprise, a ‘something for nothing’ and improvement in experience was snapped up by the Duty Manager with a finance background.

The conversations were about both how and why particular service elements could be improved, the context is key if you understand why you are doing something you are more likely to comply, equally if you are giving a better experience whilst not having to do too much differently you feel better about yourself too.  Over the course of the weekend we built the conversation and added nuances to the bar service one at a time.  So for example acknowledging a customer when they arrive even just with a nod of the head, adding a clean ashtray to the drinks table service tray so any dirty ashtrays are constantly replaced, remembering what a customer has ordered, welcoming back a customer who was in the bar on Saturday who returns on Sunday….and so on.  From a commercial perspective the challenge is to get more customers either paying guests or passing trade to use the bar, so any easy one to measure just look at the room spend for paying guests.

The acid test was when my colleagues who I had persuaded to return to the hotel thought of the improved experience.  They arrived Sunday evening and I waited in my room deliberately to see if they had a different experience (they didn’t know I had been working with the team).  When I went down and asked how it was they were delighted with this new improved experience if not slightly amazed it had happened and appreciative of the more personal and thoughtful approach being taken.  the changes cost nothing, they persuaded my colleagues to keep using the Hotel so a commercial win there, and the staff enjoyed the experience too.

Improving experience can sometimes be just about taking a step back looking at how it is being delivered today and tweaking it, but importantly taking the education of your team as a pre-requisite for success.

The Ivy Cafe chain is a spin off from the original Ivy Cafe and is a mid/high end casual dining restaurant.  They have a few locations around London and I have frequented them over the last coupe of years, usually with a good experience.  So with hat background I popped in for lunch with my wife to the Marylebone location.  We hadn’t booked and it was pretty busy bu they found us a table so a good start.  After 15-20 minutes we were still waiting for someone to take a drinks order, so i had to get up and find someone,,,not so good.  We then waited another 15 minutes for someone to take a food order..again not good…We placed our order with us sharing a zucchini starter and me then having a main and my wife having a starter as a main.  Eventually the food arrived but they delivered all three of the starters even though one was main, then didn’t want to take one of them back.  So we struggled through trying to co-ordinate my main course without my wifes food getting cold!

All infall  a pretty poor performance and so when the Manageress came off and asked to usual question was everything ok?  I gave her the story of this v disappointing lunch experience, the worst I and ever had at an Ivy and not all what we were expecting!

Based on this story you might be curious about my seemingly high score of 7/10 well the redemption was that the Manageress came over to apologise and said we have made an adjustment to your bill i hope that goes some way to dealing with our under performance today…you can see what she did in the picture below……

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Judge for yourself if this save worked but for me a business that had some money in my experience bank saved itself here!

Interesting to read that BA is finally upgrading its massively out dated business class seating/offer.  The set up with many seats not even offering aisle access has been overtaken not once but multiple times by the competition.  The challenge they will now face from an experience perspective is the one that all large airlines suffer from when they upgrade…one leg of a flight might be on a new aircraft configuration and the next on an old one which causes real upset with passengers.  The usual solution is to roll out aircraft on a route by route basis and you can then advise passengers that they can expect the upgraded facility…it will now be very interesting to see who BA deal with this.  They have a real problem because their ageing fleet means that it won’t ever be viable to upgrade some of their work-horses…the tired old 747 in particular..they will need to wait until those aircraft are retired so the transition is likely to take years to complete by which time the competition will probably on the next generation.  I guess that BA passengers can look forward to inconsistent experiences for the foreseeable future

cracking-the-roi-code-creative-experience-alan-pennington

The car hire industry has come under some sustained attack over the least 6 months with countless stories of motorists being ripped off by unscrupulous companies  – some of the bigger names are involved.  The charges about refuelling costs, hiked insurance premiums, charges to “clean cars” that have been returned amongst others.  With this in mind it was with some trepidation that I set about hiring a car for a section of our recent family trip to Florida.  As you might expect my going in expectations were actually quite low..So how did it go!

The office was small but busy and just off the airport, directions to find it were fine and the sat nav directions actually took us to the offices not some random destination as so often happens when the location is around an airport ring road.  The wait was about 3 minutes and the booking was all in order, the only problem was that I offered a debit card to secure the vehicle only to be told “we don’t accept then only credit cards”…what?  Apparently it is much easier to recoup charges off a card that is credit based I guess that debit cards are limited to what you might have in your account – I can see the logic but this was not made clear at any point during the on-line booking process…not that I recall anyway.  This caused panic as potentially we could not hire a car as I don’t carry credit cards…the guy behind the counter said “hold on let me get a Manager and see if we can sort this out”,,,that took a couple of minutes and the Manager agreed to waive the condition and accept the debit card…I guess we looked trustworthy!!  The guy then advised us about the toll charges and sold the inclusive package, the return on empty, but did not try and sell us anything else, that was a pleasant surprise.

The car was ready 5 minutes later and not only was the considerable pile of luggage loaded in for us but he gave me a really helpful teach in on the things I really needed to know (the filler cap, lights, screen wipers, sat nav, etc they had clearly thought about what information a driver needs..and what they don’t need to know) and then we are on our way.

After a few days of trouble free motoring we retuned the car to Miami Airport to be met by a very friendly and efficient young lady who checked the car over and said “your good to go thanks for using Sixt”, in due course the deposit was refunded and our Sixt experience ended.

Bearing in mind the horror stories abounding about this industry the Sixt team far exceeded my expectations with the exception of the credit card issue …that could have been a disaster.  But they did recover it and had a process in place to deal with the eventuality…so that cost the one mark deduction in my test.  I trust that this experience is replicated every time if not but they are on the right road…WELL DONE!!

#thinkdifferently

This has to be one of the iconic brand Hotels and having stayed recently in the Hard Rock, Tenerife ( see my earlier post on this hotel) I certainly had an expectation of what to expect, yes the hotel charges a not insignificant premium ($2000+ for three nights) but it is on the theme park at Universal and has that cache of Hard Rock.  Those were my going in expectations.

Perhaps what I had not factored in was the age of the Hotel (but then again why should I not expect a consistent experience) and how very tired it would therefore feel relative to the newly refurbished Tenerife Hotel.  Same baseline experience of music and music memorabilia but without the glitz and sparkle we had seen previously.

The biggest problem and let down was the room, now to explain we are a family of five including three teenagers and as such we are used to being dysfunctional as hotels like to deal with round numbers  – if you’re two you are ok or four but not FIVE!  So we do take extra time when selecting and booking to ensure everyone is clear about what we need.

That said I had called to book the hotel direct and explained that we needed space for five of us, effectively adults in terms of size and was assured that the upgraded family Suite on the Club floor would be plenty big enough and provide enough beds – well having seen the size of the rooms in our first Hard Rock experience that sounded reasonable.

So at Check-In I asked about beds to be told that there are two doubles, that is not very helpful and why did I even have to ask that question unless they assumed five of us would be squeezing into two beds!!!?

The best they could then do was add a camp bed squeezed in to the room.  The booking was for five people why had this not been seen and the requisite number of beds been in place??  When we actually got to the room the space was totally unfit for five people and that, given the price, was a major major disappointment.

The other hotel facilities, the pool,the river transfer to the Theme Parks, were ok to good and the pool bar staff were helpful and provided a good service.  Of course the upside of these aspects was overshadowed by the room problems  – that tells you something!

At check out time of course you get hit with all those extra charges in so many US hotels, the “Resort Charge”, the “Room Tax” and so on that can and do add $100’s to your bill often unexpected.  It would make sense to make all of that information much clearer upfront to avoid potential embarrassment!

So the core issues are firstly inconsistency the bane of any operation that has multiple locations and second the in effect lying to make a booking saying that room can accommodate 5 people when plainly it cannot in any comfort.  The expectations are then not met and you are only as good as the last experience – the result for me is uncertainty about visiting any more of the hotels in the group, as I felt (an emotion that means this may not be rational but so what) short changed by the experience and of course when that happens my ‘value equation’ shifts from value for money to pure pricing comparisons.

#thinkdifferently